Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Froedtert Hospital is alerting its employees who had taken religious exemptions for COVID-19 vaccination because they had concerns about the use of fetal cell lines in their development that they must now get vaccinated using a recently-approved shot.
Froedtert sent an email to its staff stating some employees now are unable to claim “religious or medical exemptions” as a reason not to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Other eligible staff continue to be exempt from a COVID-19 vaccine for religious and medical reasons, the hospital said.
The email said those employees can now be vaccinated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved Novavax vaccine. Novavax is protein, not mRNA-based. This means fetal cell lines were not used in its development.
In a statement to the Journal Sentinel Thursday, Froedtert said the change will affect less than 1% of its staff.
The policy was first reported by TMJ4.
The use of fetal cell lines in the mRNA vaccines allowed employees to receive religious or medical exemptions to the hospital’s vaccination policy.
According to a fact check by Reuters, the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines used fetal cell lines in their testing stages.
Johnson & Johnson used a human fetal cell line called PER.C6, developed from the retinal cells of an 18-week-old fetus aborted in 1985 in its production and manufacturing stages.
These fetal cell lines are not taken from recent abortions, Reuters notes. Rather, they are derived from decades-old fetal cells that have been replicated for years in laboratory setting and are thousands of times removed from the original fetal cells.
Froedtert is among many health care systems that require all employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 … READ MORE.
